Nora grew up in Ireland with her grandparents (because her parents were both drunk, promiscuous buttfaces.) She went to a muggle school near her home--and was very successful. She enjoyed the things muggles were taught and even went on to study them in her own time while at Hogwarts. Nora was sorted into Slytherin house at Hogwarts, which, at first, was a bit of a surprise. She always considered herself one of the booky Ravenclaw types, but she gradually came to understand why she'd gotten Slytherin.
Nora was a bit of a goof in school, but she made good grades nonetheless. She enjoyed all her classes--barring potions, in which she generally ended up setting things on fire. She liked to experiment with things when she should have been following the directions, so...yeah. She always liked finding out-of-the-box uses for spells--even if they didn't always work out in the projected manner. Originally she wanted to work in Magical Law Enforcement, but her first Wizarding Law class--combined with her love for legal dramas--inspired her to be a lawyer.
After Hogwarts she traveled to America and went to law school--muggle law school--and studied wizard law on her own time. She graduated top of her class and got a great job at a high-paying firm full of other wizard lawyers. She worked there for six years, defending both wizards and muggles in wizard and muggle courts, until she took a position as a prosecutor for San Francisco. At twenty-eight, two years before leaving the firm, she fell in love with a kind muggle man named Jason Marxa, married him at twenty-nine, and had her little daughter Katherine nine months later. But she was divorced at thrity-three by that same man--who cheated on her with seven other women innumerable times and then divorced her for cheating on him once, when she was kind of...drunk. Somehow (she maintains the judge was bribed) her husband got sole custody of their daughter. Nora is only allowed visits on her daughter's birthday and Christmas--which she hates because it forces her to miss most of her daughter growing up. She always wanted to teach her child to read and write and about the natural world and see her go off to her first day of school and take her to get her liscense and help her with her homework and...on and on and on.
And so, because of her limited visits she decided to move to Britain and start over as much as she could.
Loki the Pixie
When Nora first moved into her flat--a rather elderly collection of rooms situated above an equally elderly cafe--she decided to snoop through the furnishings already present. Most of the flat is fairly modern-looking, as the previous owners renovated it, but the spare room and study still contained what looked like the original...everything.
Upon opening the drapes and closet and drawers, etc in the spare room--jut to air everything out--Nora was greeted by a veritable swarm of small, blue creatures: pixies. Minus the less-than-appetizing details of the process, Nora was able to get rid of al the pixies…of so she thought. When she resumed her snooping/dusting/airing, she heard a tiny, shrill little shriek sort of noise emanating periodically from the back of the closet. Upon inspection she found a baby pixie--bright blue, small as a baby carrot, and shrill as…Well, the way Nora would have described it isn't exactly appropriate.
Despite her general distaste for pests, she found herself unable to rid herself of the creature. She thought it was actually kind of cute, if you could get past the fact he was blue…and a pixie. She considered taking him to someone who specialized in magical creatures, their rescue, and their care, but decided against it. She figured no one she could take the thing to would actually take care of it, so she decided to keep it. She named the pixie Loki, and semi-domesticated him--for he was a he, so far as she was concerned--and he is quite well-mannered unless he is agitated. Sometimes he hides things and draws on the wall, but Nora finds it more endearing than annoying--like a small child just being…a small child, which is something she's missing out on…though she is adamant than she should not be.
Loki is almost her way of being a mother, since she can't be that to her own child.
Pseudementor
After taking up the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts, Nora wanted to find a way to procure a safe dementor for students--and herself--to practice the patronus charm on. She knew it was possible to use the patronus charm on a dementor boggart, but it wasn't realistic to have to stand in front of one every time a student needed to practice--and it would be difficult to keep the positioning such that the boggart doesn't become confused. She and a friend working for the experimental charms division in the Irish ministry were able to cast a spell on the boggart while it was in dementor form to keep it from shifting into anything else.
She keeps the pseudementor in a trunk enchanted to close automatically when something is put into it so that she can stay as far away from it as she likes.
While Nora has finally come to accept her bisexuality, she's also given up on finding a long-term relationship. She pines after her ex-husband but she won't admit it, and she knows from watching his relationship with Ellie that she likely no longer has any chance with him. She is not, however, opposed to a bit of sexual fun, and will go out occasionally in search on someone to have fun with.
While on Christmas break during the 2028-2029 term, she lost her left leg in a car wreck while her ex-husband was driving. Unfortunately she was taken directly to a muggle hospital where they had to amputate her leg just above her knee. She worked with St. Mungo's on a prosthetic as well as physical therapy.
Nora's first and second years at Hogwarts overlapped with Harry Potter's sixth and seventh years, and witnessing and living through the events that transpired at Hogwarts left their mark on her. During her second year, while Hogwarts was under Voldemort's control, she became familiar with the unorthodox detention methods. As both a Slytherin and a pureblood, certain students and teachers expected her to have certain opinions, and when she refused to agree with their blood superiority and muggle dehumanization bullshit, she was punished for it.
While she hated--no, while she loathed the cruciatus curse with every fibre of her being, by far the worst part of the occupation of Hogwarts was the dementors. Just...the look of them was terrifying enough, but the feelings they brought with them made it ten times worse. Even before her second year she had run-ins with dementors as their numbers increased, and her fear of them only seemed to attract them more. Her grandmother, knowing dementors had been sighted near their home, tried to get her to stay inside and not go out alone, but as a child Nora had a penchant for wandering. She was lucky enough to be with a group that made it out of the castle before the main battle began, but they were waylaid by dementors and very lucky that a few among them managed to produce patronus charms strong enough to keep the rest of their trip safe.
In her third year, she was not able to defeat the boggart she faced--she couldn't even come close--and had to be rescued by the professor and taken to the hospital wing as she was practically catatonic. She has never been able to defeat any boggart since then, and she is very careful about opening things or going places that may contain dementors for that reason.
Nightmares stemming from both her second-year detentions and encounters with dementors plagued her often for most of her school years, and they still do occasionally, but while in college she made good use of the psychology grad student therapy program and was able to get a handle on the nightmares.
While Nora has never faced a true dementor since learning the patronus charm, she has practiced it on the pseudementor she has in her possession. She has never been able to banish a boggart without help from someone else, but she can overcome her fear enough to use the patronus charm to force it back into where it came from. However, against her boggart, she can never manage to get past her fear enough to produce it in corporeal form.
